It is known in this field of invention to make lottery tickets of the "break-open" variety where a player breaks a seal and pulls back a portion of the ticket to reveal a window in which certain symbols appear. Ordinarily each type of symbol (orange, lemon, cherry etc.) corresponds to a different prize and 15 if three like symbols appear in the window, the player will recognize that the ticket is a winning ticket. Ordinarily, the prizes are fairly small, and tickets are redeemed at the point of purchase, usually a convenience store or charity operator.
One of the key problems of lottery tickets of this type is that an unscrupulous person could create a ticket which appears to be a winning ticket by removing symbols from other non-winning tickets of the same type, and inserting these symbols into one ticket, such that three symbols of a kind appear in one window. Since the are usually redeemed at point of purchase, the cashier who redeems the ticket and awards the appropriate prize would not normally have access to sophisticated means to detect carefully altered tickets. It follows, then, that altered non-winning tickets may be honoured as winning tickets, with a resulting loss of revenue.
In order to prevent this form of cheating, it is known in the prior art to include in the lottery tickets a series of codes by which winning tickets and the correspondence to particular prizes can be determined. These codes tend to be awkward to use, in that reference must be made to an entire series of tickets in order to determine whether a given ticket is truly a winning ticket in that series. Further, by a process of elimination, it can be determined whether remaining tickets in a given series are likely to be winning tickets, simply by reference to the codes of previously redeemed winning tickets of that series. This information could be improperly used to determine whether or not to purchase tickets from a given series.
Accordingly, it is an object of this invention to provide a "break-open" lottery ticket which is not susceptible to tampering, in that no benefit can be gained by tampering since, in order to obtain the symbols necessary to create a winning ticket by tampering, a winning ticket of the same value must be destroyed, and therefore not redeemed.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a "break-open" lottery ticket in which a novel form of security indicia can be readily noted at a glance by the person validating and honouring the ticket and awarding a prize, with out reference to collateral validity reference sources.
It is a still further object of the present invention to provide a "break-open" lottery ticket in which the ticket security indicia do not provide information which can be used to reduce the odds of locating a winning ticket in a given series of tickets.